Innovations in Hearing Aids: From DIY to Brain‑Responsive Tech

This episode of our Tech Briefs podcast series Here’s an Idea™ explores a variety of new-and-improved hearing aids, from $1 “do-it-yourself” devices to advanced systems that monitor brain waves.

Here’s an Idea brings you the inspiration behind invention, through interviews with the makers of today’s most exciting technologies.

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The Technologies

• (01:13):  Innovation at the VA: A 3D-Printed Stent for Collapsed Cartilage
• (08:02): A $1 Hearing Aid That You Can Build in an Hour
• (15:28): A Mind-Reading Hearing Aid for the 'Cocktail Party Problem'
• (22:19): A Brain Monitor for Cochlear-Implant Calibration

MORE INFORMATION ON THE TECHNOLOGIES FEATURED IN OUR EPISODE

A 3D-Printed Stent

To help a veteran with collapsed ear cartilage, Nikki Beitenman, a supervisory biomedical engineer at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina, helped a team at the hospital to design and build a 3D-printed stent. The FDA-approved device is leaps and bounds ahead of its first prototype: two straws!

A Low-Cost Hearing Aid

Saad Bhamla, a Georgia Tech professor and bioengineer, knows that hearing aids are way too expensive. Bhamla is making a "LoChAid" hearing aid that costs just under a dollar — and, if you know how to use a soldering iron, you can build one too!

Learn how to construct the LoCHAid:

A Hearing Aid for 'Cocktail Parties'

Dr. Nima Mesgarani, a professor at Columbia University and a lead researcher in the University’s Neural Acoustic Processing Lab, wanted to make a hearing aid that could help with "the cocktail party problem," to make a device that zeros in on the person doing the speaking, and suppresses the other sound sources. How did he do it? His system monitors brain waves.

• Watch a demo of the brain-controlled hearing aid.
• See how Mesgarani is reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. 

A Brain Monitor for Cochlear Implants

Ben Somers, a post-doc researcher at KU Leuven, wants to monitor the brain too. Learn how measuring brainwave activity can confirm not just that a listener hears you, but that they understand.

Learn more about Ben.